And All Between
by Sister Coyote
Summary: Their exile lasted nine years. Spoilers for both games. Leon, Aerith and Yuffie.
1. Seeds

They found the remains of Aerith's garden on the third day after they returned to Hollow Bastion.

It was . . . well, a mess, unsurprisingly. Under the rule of dark, nothing had grown well - the hills outside the city, which had once been orchards and lush farmland, were now bare earth where they weren't glassy slag. Something had demolished the buildings on the north side of the courtyard in which she'd planted her garden. Scorched bricks, broken masonry and glass shards littered the bare ground. Only sere leaves and brambly stems told that anything had ever grown here. Leon glanced at Aerith, unsure what reaction to expect. She was strong - strong enough to bear up in exile for years without breaking or even losing the sweetness of her nature, stronger than almost anyone he knew - but this garden had been the heart of her, once upon a time.

Her face was drawn, but resolute. "Well," she said. "There's a lot of work to do, but it could be worse." She paced the margin of the garden, stepping over a pile of shattered clay shingles. "The important part is that it's ours again."

Leon felt a muscle twitch at the corner of his mouth. "We'll help you. If you want." His gaze fell on Yuffie, perched on the dark frame of a blown-out window. "Right, Yuffie?"

Yuffie stuck out her tongue at him, then sprung down from the window. "Sure."

He knew she would, too. The garden had been Aerith's, that was sure, but it was a lynchpin for all three of them, now.


	2. In the Woods

Yuffie knows this story, but she thinks Squall and Aerith don't remember it. Or at least, Squall and Aerith—at sixteen and fifteen—don't believe it to apply to them, because they think of themselves as adults. (She knows that Aerith cries at night about her mother, and she knows that Squall refuses to cry, just as he refuses to answer to his own name, because he wants to reassure himself of his own strength. She doesn't think she'll ever get used to calling him 'Leon.')

She knows they think they need to be adults for her. She thinks this is _stupid_. She isn't just Yuffie but The Great Yuffie, and at this rate, she's going to have to start taking care of _them_.

Yuffie knows this story, and she knows it's not a story you come safely through by thinking like an adult. She knows that if the two of them will go on insisting on being serious that she will have to work twice as hard at _not_ being serious, to make up for it.

And at the end of the story, she will be the one to chop off the wolf's head, to slam the oven door on the witch, to carry home the skull whose eyes burn with holy fire. And then she will lead them home, running, laughing, on a trail of breadcrumbs.


	3. Bury My Heart in Fallow Ground

He could feel the weight of her gaze on the back of his neck.

"Squall," Aerith said, "making yourself sick won't do anything to help."

"I told you not to call me that." His voice was thick. He turned his face up toward the rainy sky. Water trickled through his hair. "I don't want you to call me that until we're home again."

He could see her out of the corner of his eye, standing in the open doorway that lead from their rooms to the balcony. She pleated her skirt between her fingers, smoothed it out, then rumpled it between her knuckles again. He regretted worrying her, but he felt more anger than sorrow. She said, "So what are we supposed to call you? 'Hey you'?"

He didn't like to admit it, but part of the reason he was standing there with his shirt plastering itself to his chest was that the cold rainwater feels good on the bridge of his nose, where the cut had long since turned to a scab and the scab was rapidly becoming simply a scar; but it still ached sometimes.

"You're going to catch a cold," she said, and then suddenly she lost her patience, and her tone turned from cajoling to crisp: "And then you'll give it to Yuffie, and we'll be stuck listening to her complain that her nose is stuffy and trying to keep her in bed and pouring soup down her throat and I swear to you, Squall Leonhart, if that happens I'm going to leave _you_ to keep an eye on her, so help me."

He conceded defeat. "Leon."

"What?"

"Call me Leon," he said. "Until we go home."

* * *

The first time he found a Heartless in Traverse Town, it was all Leon could do not to break and run. It was simple ego that saved him from that—ego, and the fact that, while Aerith was white as bone, she wasn't running.

The . . . thing . . . reached for him with smoking dark fingers and he reacted instinctively, without thinking, by pulling the gunblade out of the holster on his hip and whacking the darkling creature with it, again and again. He wasn't sure he was even holding it correctly. They'd only just begun to teach him to use the gunblade, after all —

He realized that the creature was gone, fled or dissolved, and he was whacking his blade against the bare cobblestones. Aerith had both hands on his shoulders and was shouting, "Leon! _Leon!_" He flinched, turning the blade around so he could see how much damage he'd done to the edge, which would definitely need sharpening, now.

"I need to learn to really use this thing," he said, a touch ruefully, and Aerith nodded, her hand on his forearm.

* * *

They took it one day at a time, because there wasn't anything else to do. For Leon, sixteen turned to seventeen, and seventeen to eighteen, and then he was twenty-one without really being sure how he got there.

He hung on to memories of Hollow Bastion, reconstructing its streets and buildings in his mind: High Market, Little Market, the Borough, the fancy houses of the Peregrine Hill neighborhood, and the Castle looming over it all. He talked to Aerith and Cid about it, sometimes: "Remember High Market during carnival? Remember what the Bailey was like in winter?"

"And that time we went up on it in the snow and you and Cloud almost broke your fool necks trying to slide down the railing when it was all icy?" Aerith said, and laughed. In some ways, it was a good sign that she could talk about Cloud and laugh, but, perversely, it also made him sad, because it meant she was putting it all behind her.

Yuffie remembered less and less—she had been pretty small when they left—and seemed perfectly at home in Traverse Town. She knew every corner of the place, and could cross from one end to the other by leaping from rooftop to rooftop; she had charmed half of the shop owners and infuriated the rest. She was, of her own volition, learning to fight, but although she couldn't defeat a Heartless, she knew every nook and passage of the city, and could outrun and outhide them. "Do you remember the time Aerith took you to Little Market to get ice cream?" he asked—he wasn't with them that time, he had thought himself entirely too cool at the time to hang around Aerith and her babysitting charge, but he had been loitering in the square at the time, and distinctly rememebered Yuffie getting chocolate all over herself.

"Um," she said. " . . . Yeah? I think?" It wasn't a convincing lie. His heart broke a little. In a few years she'd remember almost nothing of Hollow Bastion, he thought.

* * *

"She's _forgetting_," he said to Aerith and Cid, that night. "She's forgetting all about Hollow Bastion."

"Well, she was only just seven when we left," Aerith said, "and it's been five years—"

"But it's our _home_," he said, pounding his fist on the table with more force than he really intended. "We can't just give it up. Not after five years, not after ten, not after _fifty_."

Cid sighed. "We can't stop living. Just because we're here and not in Hollow Bastion."

"But—" He looked at Aerith, feeling lost, unmoored. He didn't know what to say.

* * *

"Come on come on come on!" Yuffie said. "Come see what I found!" She squirmed between the bars of the grate and splashed waist-deep in water of dubious quality.

"Yuffie . . . " he began.

He had to hold his breath and turn sideways to get through, and even then it took a few determined tugs from Yuffie. Once he made it, she turned away and began to swim through the brackish water like a frog, all long limbs and her hair sticking to the back of her neck. He was tall enough that he could walk, all the way to the slimy-rock shore.

"What?" he said, when he was finally out of the water and on the mossy rocks.

"Just this," she said. "I found it a few months ago. Nobody else knows it's here, so it can be a place. You know. A secret place, for you and me and Aerith."

"A secret place for what?" he asked.

"So we can plan how to get home," she said with a little roll of her eyes. For all her feigned contempt, however, he could see a hint of eagerness in her. She desperately wanted him to like it.

"Yeah," he said. "Good thinking, Yuff."

* * *

"She doesn't need me to teach her to fight," Leon remarked after the third sparring match with Yuffie. He sat on the edge of the water, next to Aerith, watching Yuffie—the only one of them who ever _wanted_ to swim in the questionable water—dive and resurface and shake water out of her hair. "I don't know who she found to teach her that ninja stuff, but he's doing a good job. Pretty soon she'll be able to beat me in unarmed combat."

"She likes it, though," Aerith said. "Anyway, it works out. You teach her to fight, and she teaches you to laugh."

He snorted. "And Cid teaches us how to, what? Swear?"

"Oh, come on. He's been good about that almost since we got here." Aerith looped her arms around her knees and rested her chin on them. "Cid teaches us to be stubborn old cusses, which is really never a bad thing."

"I don't think Yuffie needs the help," he muttered. Aerith laughed. He looked at her for a moment, and then, without planning to, said, "And you teach us how to hold out for the impossible without going crazy in the process."

She smiled. "Most things aren't impossible," she said, "if your heart's in the right place."

* * *

If he was being honest with himself, part of the problem with Sora was simply that Leon was jealous. He'd waited and fought and struggled and sacrified for so long, and here came this kid with the keyblade and a stupid grin, and it was _his_ home, not the kid's—why did he have to hang at the sidelines, playing backup and hoping?

It wasn't just that he wasn't going to be the one to take back his home. What made it worse, added insult to injury, was how little like him Sora was. He was occasionally noisy, aggressively cheerful, half-shameless and half-sheepish, and he bonded with people almost instantly. Leon wanted his home back, but this kid just wanted to help _everyone_, he had no focus, he was impulsive, he didn't understand. Sora acknowledged that he needed to use his keyblade to save the worlds, but he couldn't shut _up_ about finding his friends, as though that were the important part.

And worst of all was the fact that Leon had a thin, sneaking fondness for him, because he was fundamentally a good kid, and easy to like. And that was infuriating, because Leon couldn't even resent him properly.

"You always gotta find something to be grumpy about," Yuffie said. She bounced on the balls of her feet. "We're going _home_. You want that more than anything."

"There'll be a fight," Leon said.

"Good," she said, and turned a cartwheel, and flashed him a grin. He couldn't help but smile back.

* * *

That first night, with the worlds reopening like flowers somewhere he couldn't see, he sat high on the bailey wall and stared out over the remains of Hollow Bastion. Aerith came up the stairs slowly and sat down beside him.

"It's not quite what I expected," he said.

"Mm?" Aerith asked. "Disappointed?"

"No." He realized as he said it that it was the truth. "No, not really. But—it isn't—"

"Of course not," she said. He looked at her. She was smiling her wide honest smile. "You were never really away from home."

He frowned a little bit, looking away from her, out over the city. There was so much more to do here, so much rebuilding, so many exiles to round up and so much darkness still to fight back and wash away. Somewhere below he could hear Yuffie shouting, "Hey, _look what I found!_" and Cid shouting back, "How the hell did you get up there?" His frown smoothed out.

"Can we start calling you Squall again?" Aerith asked.

After a long moment, he shook his head. "No. Call me Leon. I think I like being Leon better than I did being Squall, anyway."


End file.
